The dessert course for The Best Meal Ever included an Eccles Cake, a pastry so sublime that my better half vowed to recreate it at home. So please welcome this guest post from She Who Must Be Obeyed:

It was time to leave St. John after an incredible meal. You’ve read all the particulars in this blog so I will not rewrite what David has described so well, except to add that it was difficult to drag myself away from the table with some of my St. John’s Eccles cake left on my plate. These thoughts ran swiftly thorough my brain: I can not eat another bite…well, perhaps one more bite…no, I will not make myself sick…wait — we have the cookbook at home, I’ll make some as soon as we get back. With that decision made, I left St. John and eventually found a Saturday when I could bake. David writes about cooking — I write about baking (and eating).

I wanted this post to be in as much detail as David’s usually are, but I can’t do that, so I think I’ll show some highlights and moan about the one thing I didn’t do consistently, and brag that in the end my result was almost as tasty as the original. In the end I know that while it will surely be some time before I can get back to St. John itself, I can enjoy Eccles cakes when I need them!

Immediately after we arrived home I pulled out the The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating and looked up the St. John’s Eccles cake recipe (page 180). It seemed so straightforward¹ that I could taste the cakes even before I began.

9 tablespoons of butter, 4 cups or flour, a pinch of salt, and 1 cup of water, all worked together into a paste.

The cold paste rolled out, with 3 1/3 sticks of butter layered onto one half.

Paste folded over the butter and crimped.

Dough rolled out and folded into thirds

1 1/2 cups currants, mixed with 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp. allspice, and 1 tsp. nutmeg.

The final folded pastry, which is rolled out to 3/8 inch thick and cut into 3 1/2 inch circles.

Filling sandwiched between two pastry circles, edges crimped, tops slashed, covered with egg wash and sugar, and baked for 15 minutes at 400 degrees.

Finished cakes. You can see some of the tops separating from the bottoms.

As you can see from the picture above, some of my crimps gave way in Whole Beast version and I experienced a leaking problem from a few cakes.  It turns out that there is a failure point in the original recipe and I’m confident that I found it!

If we had Beyond Nose to Tail in the kitchen, rather on the to-be-read stack, I might have seen the following on page 121:

ECCLES CAKES

It’s good to put things right.

Since the first book, Nose to Tail Eating, I have changed the way we assemble the Eccles cake. Rather than sandwiching two discs of puff pastry together, we now use a single disc approximately 9cm in diameter. So place your Eccles cake mix in the centre of the disc and pull up the sides of the pastry to cover the filling. Seal it with your fingers, then turn it over and slash the top.

(Note that the updated St. John’s Eccles cake recipe was also run in The Guardian on November 27, 2007.)

Let this be a lesson to everyone – always do your research. The photo below is from round two, made with the leftover dough and filling, and using the new technique.

Finished cakes. Note the crimping on the underside.

In the end since the recipes were identical, the taste was perfect with both versions. I look at all of these pictures now and still can still taste every bite. However, do yourself a favor and follow tradition, these cakes are “particularly fine when consumed with Lancashire cheese.” Tradition rarely tastes so wonderful.

¹David wanted me to include this note. He felt the recipe was not a clear as it could be on turning and rolling out the dough but I think that anyone with pastry experience should have little trouble following the instructions. If you need a refresher, The Joy of Cooking shows you how in the puff pastry section. My one suggestion is that if you really think you’ll get confused on the next roll direction, put a Post-It on the side before you put it in the refrigerator.

She Who Must Be Obeyed came home from work on Friday with a huge bag full of gooseberries. Not just any gooseberries, but gooseberries from her boss’s gooseberry bushes. Gooseberries that could not be politely refused, as one does with a co-worker’s zucchini or eggplant or basil.

They also came with an injunction from the boss’s wife: See what you can do with these. I had no intention of undertaking a major baking project on the hottest weekend of the summer so far, so I fell back on a tried-and-true preparation: jam. I consulted the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preservation for the particulars of gooseberry jam prep and got to work.

I started by cleaning and trimming the berries. Correction: I started by telling She Who Must Be Obeyed to clean and trim the berries, since she was responsible for their arrival in the kitchen. An hour later she asked for my help. Gooseberries have a stem on the top and a “tail” at the bottom, both of which must be removed. The stem pops right off, but the tail has to be trimmed off with a paring knife.

Two hours later, I had my ingredients ready: three cups of gooseberries, three cups of sugar, and a half cup of water.

I added the water and half of the berries to a pan and brought it to a boil over medium heat. I mashed some of the berries with a potato masher.

I added the sugar and stirred to combine.

I let the mixture boil over medium heat for 15 minutes. While the berries cooked, I set up my jars, which had been sitting in boiling water in my canning kettle.

When the jam was ready — described by the self-referential “thick and jammy” — I tested it by dropping a spoonful of the syrup on a plate that had been chilled in the freezer. The jam set immediately without running, which meant it was ready.

Using a wide-mouthed canning funnel, I ladled jam into each of the jars.

I covered each jar with a lid, then sealed the lids with the bands, turning until the bands were finger-tight.

I placed the covered jars into the kettle and let them boil for fifteen minutes. The heat forces air out of the jars, which them produces a vacuum seal as the jars cool.

I removed the jars and let them cool, listening for the “pop” each lid makes as the vacuum is formed.

And that’s all there is to making jam. There are particulars that vary depending on the acidity and natural pectin levels of the fruit being preserved, but the basic technique is the same.

When I asked the pie lady at the farmer’s market if she had ever made gooseberry jam, she said “I’d only make it from the pink berries, which are far less common than the green ones. It’s a very pretty jam.”

Judge for yourself:

I’m sending a jar back to the boss’s wife. It is a lovely shade of transparent pink, and tasted pretty good, so it was worth the effort.

But if you see a friend or office mate heading toward you with a big bag of round, striped berries — run!

Mark Bittman’s at it again, this time offering up a list of 101 salads for the summer. At least one of these recipes will fulfill the dual requirements of what’s in the fridge/pantry and summertime dinner laziness.

In theory, each salad takes 20 minutes or less. Honestly, some may take you a little longer. But most minimize work at the stove and capitalize on the season, when tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, fruit, greens and more are plentiful and excellent. This last point is important. Not everything needs to be farmers’ market quality, but it’s not too much to expect ripe fruit, fragrant herbs and juicy greens.

I’m looking at you, #57, you’ll be on the plates before the weekend’s over.